Saturday, December 6

Tag: Ava Pickett

Emma – Rose Theatre
London

Emma – Rose Theatre

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. At least, Jane Austen’s Emma did. Ava Pickett’s Emma has got issues. Handsome and clever but decidedly not rich, her father is a crook, her sister is a crackpot, and her own disposition is anything but happy. This Essex-set adaptation of the literary classic opens at Oxford’s May Ball and is throughout infused with the vaguely sickeningly hedonistic energy of that messy melee. Blatantly dismissive of the traditional Regency aesthetic of horse-and-carriage romance, this production instead takes on the look and feel of a Piccadilly Circus rickshaw ca...
1536 – Almeida Theatre
London

1536 – Almeida Theatre

A period drama which couldn’t be more pertinent, 1536 by Ava Pickett is a triumph of feminist rage against a system which is perpetually rigged against women. The trail of Anne Boylen seen through the eyes of three anonymous women - stripping patriarchal attitudes down to bare bones, this electrifying drama exposes – with a warning claxon – the dangerously well-trodden path toward female subjugation. It is not a play to be missed. ‘History is told by victors. And for most of history, men have been the victors’ states Suzannah Lipscomb in the programme’s foreword. This is a play which inverts that narrative. In a small village near Essex, Anna (Siena Kelly). Jane (Liv Hill) and Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) gather in their seclusion of their childhood meeting place, hungry for London’s gossi...